When the CCIE was incepted in 1993 it was an entirely different test than it was today. The 1993 era test went incredibly deep into the intricacies of Cisco IOS and Routing/Switching protocols, which makes the test today seem almost surface level. This statement makes some “modern CCIEs” cringe as if it means they didn’t…
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My First CCIE Lab Attempt
On August 27th I took my first attempt at the CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure Lab. Although I didn’t pass this time, I’ve gained a lot of valuable insights into the exam. Hopefully, sharing this will allow other people to be more prepared for the logistics of taking their lab. My exam took place in Richardson, Texas,…
Cisco SD-Access Lab Workbook
My free SD-Access workbook will take you from beginner to feeling comfortable with SDA. The workbook challenges you to build the fabric yourself by giving each step of building the fabric as a lab task for you to complete with a complete answer key at the end of the book. A prerequisite to the workbook…
Defeating Circular Dependencies in Physical Networking Labs
Objective For a long time, I have wanted to automate the physical part of my lab. My goal was being able to wipe the devices and then bootstrap them with different configs to match the solution I am researching without manual intervention. Even my surface level thinking on this process made me realize there is…
Demystifying NAT DIA in Cisco SD-WAN on IOS-XE
Everyone knows how to do NAT on vanilla IOS-XE, but what happens when you put IOS-XE in SD-WAN mode?
OSPF Filtering Lab
The below diagram shows different methods of filtering different types of OSPF routes. You can also download the YAML file of the topology with OSPF and IP addressing configured, ready for you to practice filtering.
Controlling Traffic Flows using TLOC Preference in Cisco SD-WAN
One of the major reasons Viptela decided to build their own routing protocol for their SD-WAN is the introduction of TLOCs. TLOCs or Transport Locators are a tuple of information that acts as the next hop of a route within the SD-WAN fabric. A TLOC simply describes the WAN interface of an edge router. TLOCs…